I find it surprising that Cloud Storage Buzz, has been online in some form since January 2009, and somehow we have never talked about the computer backup rule of three. I don’t know why we never talked about it, perhaps because we always just assumed that people know these things, but we all know about what happens when we assume something. It is time to put this oversight to rest and talk about the computer backup rule of three also called the Backup 3-2-1 rule.
I don’t know who originally came up with this term but Scott Hanselman has a great summary of what the rule is.
- 3 copies of anything you care about – Two isn’t enough if it’s important.
- 2 different formats – Example: Dropbox+DVDs or Hard Drive+Memory Stick or CD+CrashPlan, or more
- 1 off-site backup – If the house burns down, how will you get your memories back?
If you follow the Backup 3-2-1 rule you should be pretty safe to be able to survive a hard drive disaster or any other calamity that might destroy your data. It is not as hard as it sounds to make sure that you have 3 copies of your data on two different formats.
The great part is how cloud storage and backup can help you to easily keep multiple copies of your data not only off-site but also in different formats. What can be a challenge is using different formats since the size of backups can grow quickly depending on what you are backing up. While creating a backup to DVD sounds like a great idea, who really wants to sit and do it once a month and burn several disks of photos. If it is not easy people will not do it, so I would suggest just going and buying some extra external hard drives. I makes it easy to backup to and switch them out so you can keep newer versions of of the backup. While it technically breaks the rule of 2 formats it certainly makes it more likely that you will continue to backup.
Of course the most important thing is to make sure you backup and test your restores. It is only a matter of time before you suffer a data loss but with a solid backup and restore you can rest easy knowing you can get your files back.